Wild Blue Yonder
This week I got ahold of Werner Herzog's Wild Blue Yonder a science fiction fantasy. It's a speculative film about space exploration utilizing stock footage and archival material primarily from NASA and from a team that dived beneath the ice in Antarctica. The Antarctic ocean stands in for a new planet with a liquid atmosphere.
In some ways the film is really cheezy. It's narrated by a man who claims to be from the Andromeda Galaxy. Andromedans come to Earth because their planet is dying. In an ironic reversal, Earth's explorers end up on his home planet. The Andromedans have successfully integrated themselves into Earth's civilizations, but they are unable to create a new civilization of their own.
The film has lots of holes in it, but I don't think the point of the film was to be logically sound. It's really more about the possibilities of space exploration, and the associated emotional aspects. Two points of the film really hit home with me.
The Astronauts get into deep space and the narrator describes how they are so faraway from our solar system that the sun no longer rises or sets. There is nothing outside their windows but tiny points of light. The Astronauts have to deal with the emotional consequences of the claustrophobia and the isolation. This hits at the heart of why I find space so disturbing. I enjoy space angst, but only in small doses.
In another portion of the film, the Andromedan talks about distances in space. How our nearest star is 4.5 light years away, and that if we were to use conventional methods of space travel, after 20,000 years, the entire span of human history, (he countes pre-history) the Astronauts would have travelled only 15% of the journey.
He says something like, "After 500 generations... how could you have avoided inbreeding, rebellions, murders, would you not just become grossly maldeformed freaks with no idea where you came from or why you began the journey to begin with?" Lost, inbred, mad, any travelling civilization would have lost all memory of the original mission. It seemed like an apt metaphor for the human condition. There's a reason we call our planet "Spaceship Earth."
But the real reason for watching this film isn't for the narrative. The whole point of this movie is to step back and see human exploration in a new light. The space footage involves astronauts going about daily routine: sleeping, exercising, eating, brushing their teeth, just like we do, but in an alien setting. The undersea footage is equally as foreign, and the overlay of narrative and the heart-squeezing music makes the viewer see our own world in a new light.
The Antarctic ocean is teeming with life, in contrast to what the astronauts encounter in space. Apparently, the divers in that sequence are beneath 30 feet of ice, but the intensity of the sun in the Antarctic summer lights up the ocean like it's only a thin crust. There are strange jellyfish, lots of floating matter. The narrator describes them as though they are fauna from his home planet, sentient creatures with an emotional life of their own.
The film teeters on the edge of sublime, equal parts dull, overwhelming, and really beautiful. It kind of shook me up. If many of the sequences seem overly long its because Herzog recorded his "Space Requiem" first, then matched the footage with the sound. The music is remarkable: cello with chant over a drone of what sounded kind of like Tibetan singers, but not quite. It turns out to be Sardinian singers.
The movie got to me in the same way as Terrence Malleck's New World with its idea of sending the kind of people as explorers who are bent upon remaking new worlds to look like our own. There is a joke throughout the film of travellers going remarkable distances to whole new worlds to live as though they always had: a shopping mall utopia.
In anycase, while I can't say whether or not I'd recommend it to others, the film did one of the many things film should do: it changed the way I look at the world in which I already live.
In some ways the film is really cheezy. It's narrated by a man who claims to be from the Andromeda Galaxy. Andromedans come to Earth because their planet is dying. In an ironic reversal, Earth's explorers end up on his home planet. The Andromedans have successfully integrated themselves into Earth's civilizations, but they are unable to create a new civilization of their own.
The film has lots of holes in it, but I don't think the point of the film was to be logically sound. It's really more about the possibilities of space exploration, and the associated emotional aspects. Two points of the film really hit home with me.
The Astronauts get into deep space and the narrator describes how they are so faraway from our solar system that the sun no longer rises or sets. There is nothing outside their windows but tiny points of light. The Astronauts have to deal with the emotional consequences of the claustrophobia and the isolation. This hits at the heart of why I find space so disturbing. I enjoy space angst, but only in small doses.
In another portion of the film, the Andromedan talks about distances in space. How our nearest star is 4.5 light years away, and that if we were to use conventional methods of space travel, after 20,000 years, the entire span of human history, (he countes pre-history) the Astronauts would have travelled only 15% of the journey.
He says something like, "After 500 generations... how could you have avoided inbreeding, rebellions, murders, would you not just become grossly maldeformed freaks with no idea where you came from or why you began the journey to begin with?" Lost, inbred, mad, any travelling civilization would have lost all memory of the original mission. It seemed like an apt metaphor for the human condition. There's a reason we call our planet "Spaceship Earth."
But the real reason for watching this film isn't for the narrative. The whole point of this movie is to step back and see human exploration in a new light. The space footage involves astronauts going about daily routine: sleeping, exercising, eating, brushing their teeth, just like we do, but in an alien setting. The undersea footage is equally as foreign, and the overlay of narrative and the heart-squeezing music makes the viewer see our own world in a new light.
The Antarctic ocean is teeming with life, in contrast to what the astronauts encounter in space. Apparently, the divers in that sequence are beneath 30 feet of ice, but the intensity of the sun in the Antarctic summer lights up the ocean like it's only a thin crust. There are strange jellyfish, lots of floating matter. The narrator describes them as though they are fauna from his home planet, sentient creatures with an emotional life of their own.
The film teeters on the edge of sublime, equal parts dull, overwhelming, and really beautiful. It kind of shook me up. If many of the sequences seem overly long its because Herzog recorded his "Space Requiem" first, then matched the footage with the sound. The music is remarkable: cello with chant over a drone of what sounded kind of like Tibetan singers, but not quite. It turns out to be Sardinian singers.
The movie got to me in the same way as Terrence Malleck's New World with its idea of sending the kind of people as explorers who are bent upon remaking new worlds to look like our own. There is a joke throughout the film of travellers going remarkable distances to whole new worlds to live as though they always had: a shopping mall utopia.
In anycase, while I can't say whether or not I'd recommend it to others, the film did one of the many things film should do: it changed the way I look at the world in which I already live.